Meetup Program Basics

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Just like a WordCamp, Meetups are an opportunity for people who love and value WordPress to get together to learn from, and connect with each other. Regardless of whether you want to to learn about WordPress or meet others who work with it, Meetup events are a way to build a strong WordPress community in your local area.

Meetups are supported by our own WordPress Meetup chapter program, which underwrites the fees for meetup.com, and provides a central support structure for Meetups globally. Joining the Meetup chapter program provides great support, information, and help to both new, and established meetups. Chapter Meetups provide a consistent experience regardless of where you attend in the world as each group has committed that they will follow a code of conduct and that they agree to our five good faith rules for meetups.

As WordPress Meetups are organized and run by local communities, anyone can show leadership and no single person is necessarily the owner of what may be organized or hosted. WordPress Meetups are groups in which anyone is welcome to organize an event.

Are you interested in seeing if you have what it takes to be a Meetup organizer? Read on for more information!

Since all event planning and organizing is done locally, Meetup organizers are reliable people who love WordPress and want to foster a local community in their area. If you have spoken with other people who are involved in technology in your town, you probably have some understanding of the level of interest people have. You may have also noticed that they all come from a lot of different backgrounds.

Being ready to create and host family-friendly, inclusive events is incredibly important to the success of your local WordPress community.

In order to create consistency in terms of people’s experiences in the WordPress community, it is important that Meetups adhere to our five good faith rules. These rules were created by a group of volunteer Meetup organizers as a means to capture the spirit of the WordPress community.

WordPress Meetups are for the benefit of the WordPress community as a whole, not specific businesses or individuals. All actions taken as an event organizer are with the best interest of the community in mind.

Membership in the local Meetup group is open to all who wish to join, regardless of ability, skill, financial status, or any other criteria.

Meetups are volunteer-run with volunteer speakers. In cases where a modest attendance fee might be necessary, this fee should only cover the costs of the Meetup and shouldn’t be used to pay speakers or organizers.

Meetup groups allow events to be organized by any reliable/trusted member of the community.

Meetups are welcoming places where everyone works to foster an accepting environment which is free of discrimination, incitement to violence, promotion of hate, and general jerk-like behavior.

We also ask everyone that organizes WordPress Chapter Meetup to uphold the principles of the WordPress open source project, including the GPL. This helps protect the user/attendee, who might not realize that by using a non-GPL plugin or theme, they are giving away the rights that WordPress provides them.

If you’re already an organizer of a WordPress Meetup group, you are also invited to join the chapter program. Here is a list of some things you can expect:

WordPress Community Support takes over payment of meetup.com dues and is listed as the primary group organizer and the original owner’s status changes to co-organizer. Existing co-organiser status remains the same. WordPress now “owns” the meetup.com account, and everyone running events is on equal footing.

Organizers retain access to the group tools on meetup.com.

The group name and URL remain the same.

The design of your site stays the same (unless you are using a “fauxgo” or are misspelling WordPress, in which case we’d ask you to fix that).

Once a year, your members and organizers will receive a survey to gather feedback about your meetup. Results will be shared and discussed so that if there are any needs, the community support team can work together with you to figure out what the solution might be.

You will receive some great WordPress swag (stickers and buttons/badges) to kick things off, but if you have any swag left over from a recent WordCamp, you can also share that with your members.

We encourage you to find a donated space for your Meetup events, but when a donated venue can’t be found, we now offer support in covering venue costs. We will also be working with Meetup organizers to determine what costs and/or supplies could be provided by the central account to make organizing events easier.

If you currently require people apply to join your group, we ask that you remove that requirement. WordPress meetup groups are open to all who are interested. You may still ask those questions on the “Join this Meetup” form, but membership of the group should not require those responses.

We ask that organizers adjust their meetup “Group Tools” settings so that any member of the group may be allowed to suggest events rather than going through the listed co-organizers. If someone wants to organize a Saturday morning WordPress coffee shop get-together that only five people attend, and you want to organize a more formal presentation for 80 people, both of those are equally valuable. We believe that the more people getting together and connecting to talk about WordPress, the better, and having only a few people organize events automatically limits their number and scope.